A year or two ago, people would heap scorn on the Huffington Post, since although it employs excellent journalists who do valuable reporting, it also practices a brutal click-driven kind of management, in which celebrity news and grabby headlines are used to pull readers in, leaving some vaguely ashamed they read it in spite of themselves. HuffPo may not have invented the sideboob slideshow, but they brought it to such a high level that they eventually created an entire sideboob section on their web site, which is, not surprisingly, the top result you get on Google when you search the term. The section was created as a joke, but also kind of not.
Yet these days, you don't hear many of those complaints about HuffPo anymore. Why? One word: Buzzfeed. One might not have thought that another web site could find gold in the combination of guilty pleasure clickbait and actual journalism that HuffPo pioneered, but Buzzfeed did. Today, if someone is lamenting our short attention spans and the endless search for traffic, Buzzfeed is the site they'll mention. And how did they do it? Lists. Magical, wonderful lists. And Corgis. And Ryan Gosling. And lists about corgis and Ryan Gosling. Sideboob pics are for amateurs; if you want to grab the clicks, try "The 14 Most Insane Wedding Dresses of All Time," or "37 Professional Photoshoppers Who Should Be Fired Immediately," or "26 Things You Never Want to See Under a Microscope." Just try to resist clicking, I dare you.
So is there a way for politicians to get some of this action? The National Republican Congressional Committee, a name virtually synonymous with hip young people retweeting things with extra exclamation points, is betting that there is, according to the National Journal:
